Google apologizes for Friday's outage, Yahoo apologizes for poking fun at it

Last Friday, when some Google services went down for users across the world, rival Yahoo took a dig at the search giant by Tweeting "Gmail is temporarily unavailable", followed by an image of Google's "Temporary Error (500)" page. But in an interesting twist of events, the company removed the tweet and issued an apology for the controversial message.

"Earlier today, a tweet that reflected bad judgment was posted and has been deleted. We apologize to @Google and the @Gmail team," read an update on Yahoo's timeline. While it is not yet clear why Yahoo apologized, many believe that the company must have been taken aback by some tweets which recalled issues Yahoo recently had regarding the availability of its own mail service.

On Friday, January 24, Google's services like Gmail, Google+, and Hangouts went down for nearly half an hour -- from 10:55 am PST to 11:30 am PST. The outage began when one of Google's internal systems encountered a bug, and generated incorrect configurations. It took Google more than thirty minutes to fix the problem.

The Mountain View-based company issued an apology for the outage. "Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies," said Ben Treynor, Google's VP of Engineering. The search giant has promised to put more checks and monitors in place to ensure that this kind of problem doesn't happen again.

Techcrunch reported that a technical glitch related to the outage resulted in thousands of emails being sent to a Fresno, California-based man’s Hotmail account. But Google confirmed that the glitch was not related to the outage.